​During her fellowship year, Gussie will be researching insect herbivory on fossil leaves from the Late Cretaceous (~75 million years ago) in North America. She will be using a paleobotanical collection from New Mexico to study the diversity and intensity of insect herbivory at the National Museum of Natural History. Gussie will also conduct fieldwork in Coahuila, Mexico to collect a new fossil flora and study its insect damage. These two projects will tie into her overall dissertation on the biogeography of plant-insect associations during the Late Cretaceous of western North America.